Michael Kordahi created a way to see how Bing search results compare to the other big search players - it gives you 3 columns of results and you can vote which one has the best results. If you’re using IE you can also add BlindSearch as a IE search provider.

So there is plenty of talk about Google being the best search engine out there, but with some pretty amazing improvements recently made to Live Search, and now particularly the launch of Bing, our new “decision” engine, it’s really time to see if Google really is the best – for you personally. One fun way of doing this is to use this fun little utility that Michael Kordahi wrote (a teammate of mine) called Blind Search.

Basically, you head over to http://blindsearch.fejus.com, enter your search term, and click the search button. The tool goes off and searches for your terms at Google, Bing and Yahoo. You get the three sets of results back – all formatted anonymously so you don’t know which column of results was returned by which search engine. Then you can either “vote” for the search engine that gives you the best, most appropriate results for you personally, or you can simply click on one of the results themselves and head off on your way like you would if you were using the actual search engine.

One really cool thing is that if you’ve been using Google and want to try out Bing, but aren’t quite ready to make the switch (personally I now use Bing as my favoured search provider but hey, you never know), you can actually use Blind Search as your default search provider.

I really enjoyed Dan Reed’s latest posting - HPC: Making a Small Fortune - and the need for real innovation in this space, especially with the rise of new technologies – that’s part of the reason we looked at at combining HPC and Databases via the GrayWulf Project…

N.B. I also write for the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The following essay recently appeared on the CACMblog.

There is an old joke in the high-performance computing community that begins with a question, "How do you make a small fortune in high-performance computing?" There are several variations on the joke, but they all end with the same punch line, "Start with a large fortune and ship at least one generation of product. You will be left with a small fortune." Forty years of experience, with companies large and small, has confirmed the sad truth of this statement.